Advertisement
Published: August 11th 2016
Edit Blog Post
Day #5 proved to be 'one of those days' where we dealt with a few unlucky situations and then tried to make the best of them! We were due to be at the Olympic Rowing Stadium at Lagoa Bay bright and early this morning at 8:30am. To get to that venue, we needed to be up and out of the apartment by 7:30am. Apparently, setting an alarm on very little sleeps means sometimes the result is a lot of sleep. We woke up at exactly 11:38am this morning! If you're doing the quick math, this means we missed rowing by...a lot of hours.
We weren't due to get to Olympic Park tonight until 10:30pm to watch Men's Basketball China vs. Venezuela. Both of us love the Olympics, love watching events...but those two teams are ranked last in their pools after a few days of play and it is about a 4 hour round trip for us to head to the Olympic Park. Instead of going tonight, we decided to turn the day into a housekeeping day and attempted to pass on the magic of the Games to others.
Our plan was to head a few blocks down the street,
do some shopping (our fridge is empty), buy some laundry detergent (we're running low on underwear), get some paper for our printer and give away a set of free Olympic tickets to two people that looked like they could use a positive boost to their day!
Shopping - check. Love visiting our crazy grocery stores!
Paper - check. The printer has run out and finding it was not easy. It isn't 100% 8.5" x 11" but we'll make it work.
Laundry Detergent - check. We opted for the powder since here is is 30% of the cost of a concentrated liquid. Tough to decide when you can't read a single label.
Give Away Olympic Tickets - check. We found a younger couple sitting in one of the local juice/smoothie shops. Based on our neighbourhood, where they were and just the general demographics, it was a safe bet that they didn't have the money to head to an Olympic event. We approached them and offered two tickets to our basketball game as well as free transit passes for the day to get them there and back. This guy and girl (maybe on a date) were utterly shocked,
surprised and the excitement was written all over their face! We had to spend a few minutes justifying why we would just give these tickets away and even why we had decided to stay in this area, but once we answered those questions they literally almost ran out of the store in order to get to the Metro station and head to their event. As much as we would've enjoyed ourselves tonight, we have no doubt that they will have had more fun and have shared in a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity together. This truly is what the Olympic Games are supposed to be about. Bringing other people, cultures, religions, political ideologies together through the power of sport.
After that, we headed home and had a nice dinner in our apartment that we picked up at one of our favourite local restaurants and put the Olympics on in the background. Surprisingly, we probably see less of the games here then if we were at home parked in front of the television, so tonight was a nice treat. We watched our women's basketball team beat Senegal (more of a nail biter than we expected), women's table tennis gold match (unreal), men's indoor
volleyball (wow those guys are enormous) and it wouldn't be a night watching swimming, it seems, without seeing Michael Phelps win a race, even if it was only a semi-final. More importantly though, it was great to end the night cheering our brains out in our apartment as our Canadian Swimmers racked up another medal for our Country. The women were unreal again tonight in the pool. Make that now three medals for Penny Oleksiak. Some quick Olympic trivia -- it has only been done three times (once at a Winter Games, Cindy Klassen in Turin, Italty and now twice at a Summer Games) that a Canadian has won three medals or more at the same Games. The last person to do it at a Summer Games? Quite fittingly, the late swimmer, Victor Davis in LA in 1984. They have a pool named after him in Guelph and if Penny keeps this up, he won't be the only one! One more medal for Penny and she will be the most decorated Summer Games athlete (in a single Games) in our Country's history. For our money, she is already the hands down favourite to carry our flag at the Closing Ceremonies.
Finished up the night here at the apartment by figuring out how to operate our washing machine and hanging our clothing outside the window and all over the apartment to dry! We stay close to home tomorrow and head over to mini-Marcana Stadium for Indoor Men's Volleyball. We're super excited to cheer on our Canadian boys as they take on France tomorrow night.
One quick note. We didn't realize the comments were set to be approved, so all of you that have previously commented will now see those posted under the various blog posts. We will stay on top of this moving forward. Also, thanks to those of you that gave us a heads up about photos not being accessible today on the blog. Apparently this was a site wide issue that has since been fixed.
More pictures below.
Advertisement
Tot: 0.288s; Tpl: 0.019s; cc: 9; qc: 49; dbt: 0.0388s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.1mb
Kim Dupuis
non-member comment
:)
But guys....you didn't miss anything. It rained lol I'm sharing all your adventures with tenants and keeping the Olympic spirit alive at work. Your adventures are so exciting they gather in the lobby waiting for me to walk by to share stories. :) We had our second event today. They are sporting their ribbons and pins :) Love how the little things (laundry) are an adventure. I sooooo appreciate all the fun facts! xoxo